Review: Maria Magdalena Campos Pons/Glass Curtain Gallery

Afro-Cuban, with a bit of Chinese mixed in, and living in the United States, consummate performance photographer Maria Magdalena Campos Pons is the epitome of globalized multiple identity. Armed with her jet-black cornrows and white face paint, Campos Pons struts her multicultural stuff in her series of seven color photos, “Prayer to Obama I,” in which the two images at each end show her with her tresses hanging over her face as she grasps overflowing bunches of flowers; and the three middle images have her facing us clasping a painted figurine bust of our new president who sports a rigid grin and whose eyes are wide open, while she adopts subtle dreamy and nearly sad expressions. Campos Pons is clearly the power figure here, exuding maternal domination, albeit in prayerful rapture; the voodoo is decidedly feminist and the viewer is left to fathom the intent. In Campos Pons’s live and self-proclaimed “democratic” performance at the show’s opening, she put the audience through its paces, directing them to affirm the many splendored “gifts” of life from doubt to joy, adding that they have the “string attached” of our having to be grateful for them. (Michael Weinstein)